AMD Creates Fusion Fund to Subsidize Development of Software.

As a part of its Fusion Experience Program, Advanced Micro Devices this week established its AMD Fusion Fund, which will provide financial to developers of software that takes advantage of heterogeneous multi-core processors, such as AMD Fusion chips that include both general-purpose x86 cores as well as highly-parallel graphics processing engines.

The Fusion Fund was created to initiate strategic investments in companies working on solutions enabled by the accelerated computing units’ (CPUs’) capabilities. Starting immediately, interested ecosystem companies may submit innovative proposals for investment to be reviewed and evaluated by AMD.

“The computing industry is undergoing a long-envisioned and inevitable transition from text-based computing to a digital world of natural human-to-system interfaces and rich visual experiences that are incredibly vivid and realistic. The Fusion Fund will help expand the Fusion ecosystem focused on realizing the next generation of computing for the mainstream market,” said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, AMD Fusion Experience Program and Fusion Fund managing partner.

Projects for consideration include a range of next-generation and accelerated computing capabilities enabled by AMD Fusion APU products, including application software and tool development, unique device designs, PC components and innovative ideas which extend the reach of collaborative computing on the CPU and GPU.

“AMD’s efforts to foster growth in the ecosystem will not only benefit AMD and its APU products, but I believe the computing industry can benefit from greater support for smart, innovative companies. Because the APU is based on industry standards and pervasive x86 architecture, this technology could represent significant potential market opportunities for AMD’s ecosystem partners,” said Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst at the Enderle Group.

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Well if you look at what nVidia has been doing the last decade, this is a must for AMD/ATi. Otherwise the Fusion platform will be adopted at a similar pace as OpenCL. (Remember the engineers nVidia sent to developers free of charge after they aquired PhysX?) I definitely give this a big thumbs up.